Starting New

Saturday, January 4th, 2020

I've taken a little break in my writing here, several years as a matter of fact, but I have no lack of projects that I have completed and plan to do in the future.  I realized it is time to get back to sharing what is going on for me in the world of computers and art making.  It is a new year and a new decade, and it is time to set some new goals which include a weekly post to this blog.

To start out, I have to let you know that I have finally finished a series of pieces I made for my home and now have them all hanging up.  This project has literally taken me four years because I started over four times.  Now that that is behind me, I intend to move on to new challenges.

For this first post, I want to share with you something I created over the course of the last year to document all of my work.  My dad was a painter and to document his paintings he took photos of them, particularly the ones he gave away.  He enlarged the photos and put them in sheet protectors in a binder.  While going through the binder I realized it wasn't complete as there were paintings that I know he did that were not included.  With no notes either, I realized I had questions such as how big is the painting or who owns it now.  I'm glad to have what I have, but I wish there was more.

This experience gave me the idea that I would like to document my own pieces.  I have been in the habit of photographing my pieces and making a yearly portfolio from Shutterfly.  As nice as this is, the books sit on my bookcase and I am the only one who ever really sees them.  So I created a spreadsheet of each year's art pieces which include a picture, the title, the size, techniques, and where the pieces have been shown or published.  I have one for every year since 2010 when I started this journey.  If you go to my website you can find these spreadsheets in pdf format on my Archive page.  Since I posted them, I have found it is handy to get to them from anywhere even on my phone.

After starting this, I took printouts of them to one of my art groups thinking everyone was going to think I was crazy going to all this detail.  There was a guest at the meeting who commented that it was a great idea, and that we as artists should all have a similar record of our own work.  So I encourage you to take a look at my archive sheets and consider making a log of your own.  It is nice to have a record of everything you have done and to see your progress from year to year.